The Warner Brothers logo that's been opening feature films for the past year or two follows the trend of being more three dimensional and more dynamic than its classic predecessors. It starts with a close-up of the gold Warner Brothers shield, in which one can make out the reflection of a series of boxy, uniform buildings. I think this is supposed to be the famous Warner Brothers studio lot, but to me it's always looked a lot like a concentration camp. Even knowing what it's supposed to be, I still can't help thinking, every time, "Why is there a reflection of Auschwitz in the Warner Brothers shield?"

Which is not to say that Chill Factor is as bad as Auschwitz (that's the best segue you're going to get, so live with it.) The film stars Skeet Ulrich (whose parents, had they any honesty, would have simply named him Johnny Depp) and Cuba Gooding, Jr. as a couple of working Joes who find themselves in possession of an extremely dangerous chemical weapon that some very bad men are trying to get ahold of. It's supposed to be a comedy/action film, although it's only occasionally funny, and only occasionally exciting.

The pic opens with some back story as we meet David Paymer as Dr. Richard Long, a scientist who has designed a chemical weapon--code-name Elvis--that explodes when its temperature gets above 50 degrees. A test of the weapon goes horribly wrong, and lots and lots of people are killed. Flash forward 10 years, and Dr. Long is still working on the same weapon at a government lab in Montana. When the army major who took the fall for that testing accident all those years ago gets out of Leavenworth, he's pissed off and wants some payback. With a group of Highly-Trained Commandos (one of them a cute blonde butt-kicker) he breaks into the lab to steal Elvis.

A la Innerspace, Dr. Long, bleeding from a gunshot wound, escapes the lab with Elvis and passes it off to his fishing buddy Tim Mason (Skeet Ulrich) who works the night shift in one of those 24-hour small town Montana diners. At some point while this is happening, Cuba Gooding, Jr. appears, bopping to rap music on the radio. Now I don't want to get up on my soap box here, but how come every time the black character appears it's with a rap music theme? They never introduce a white character by playing like, Bon Jovi.

Anyway, long story short, the dying Dr. Long gives Elvis to Tim, telling him to get it to a nearby Army base and not let it get above 50 degrees. Cuba Gooding, Jr.'s Arlo has an ice cream truck, so the two men set out for the fort with the bad guys close on their tail. The next section of the movie is a kind of Wages of Fear type of thing as Tim and Arlo have to navigate the winding roads of Montana to get to this Army base. The guy who wrote the score finds all of this terribly exciting, but you probably won't. Most of the sequence is poorly shot and edited, providing very little sense of speed as the ice cream truck plods forward.

Ulrich and Gooding, as the typical bickering buddies, don't have much chemistry. You get the feeling they didn't even lunch at the same picnic table while on set. The film is also unusually flabby--dialogue that would have run only a line or two in more savvy films swells into long, boring multi-minute exchanges.

By the end game, though, the film does manage to pull out some moments of suspense. And some of the humor did, in fact make me smile. After granting the fact that no one involved in this film is overly talented, it's neither as stupid or as boring as some other so-called "action" pictures I've seen (for those of you who dig specifics, it's no, say, Passenger 57). I wouldn't go so far as to call it a passable popcorn movie, but it may be a passable imitation popcorn movie.

Feel free to turn it on if it comes on cable. But it's probably not worth giving your money to.